Talk:Dasher (software)

Importance

This article may be given the "low importance" by mistake - I think that such a usefull program, giving such ease (and speed) of input (with either a few buttons, finger movements, head movements or other limited movements) are very important to disabled people (and also to asian people, as it may improve the ease of input in their own langage). For those targeted audience the importance is probably higher than Low. I do agree that most other users will probably never use it, but still, knowing about it is (to me) important. I'm trying to find the exact definition of this "assesment" sticker, to see if it relates to a particular context (Is it for example just to day that it is "Low importance" to have it as en entry for the dvd version of wikipedia?). Please enlighten me :) I'm new to wikipedia editing... Edhel-Dil 22:30, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Agree with you 100%. Perhaps if the creator of article had made a note of why anyone would want to use such a device, it would have scored better. As it stands, many readers would think there was nothing more to this than another geekboy video game gadget. I will add a note as to the possible implications of such devices for severly handicapped people. As I write, the true-story film “Diving Bell and the Butterfly” has enhanced public awareness of “locked in syndrome”. I was surprised at how primitive and cumbersome were the methods to give back to the paralysed protagonist his ability to communicate, and was wondering how such new prosthetic devices using modern computer technology might assist these unfortunate people. Anyone interested can see my original post on my WP page. Myles325a (talk) 04:29, 27 February 2008 (UTC) (One hour later: actually, ended up substantially rewriting that par.) Myles325a (talk) 05:37, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Added WP Disability, the article will be tagged for assessment there. --Mirokado (talk) 15:10, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Efficiency

So the entropy of English words has been estimated by Shannon and others at anywhere from 0.7 to 1.2 bits per letter. How close to that limit does Dasher come when inputing English? Given that the information-theoretic properties seem to've been a big focus of the creator (based on the Google Tech Talk I watched), surely he has a number. --Gwern (contribs) 23:33 15 November 2009 (GMT)

This sounds really interesting, and I think I know what entropy is, but I'm not sure what "the entropy of English words" is. Perhaps you could fill me in? I do know that Martin Gardner, the late mathematician best known for his long association with Scientific American, wrote a series of articles in that journal around about 1980 in which he investigated computer programs which would write prose modeled on Shakespeare and other famous writers. The result was nonsense, but it had the texture of a Shakespearian prose and verse. Such programmes have been used to rule whether certain works of prose were actually created by a particular writer. Myles325a (talk) 00:58, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I believe what Gwern meant was that when writing in English, the fact that the langage is English makes some letters more likely to appear (and some succession of letters much more likely to appear : if you have just written "Welc", then a "o" is very likely to follow, for example). This means that letters do not appear "at random" : there is information to help decide what is more likely to come next. Apparently for English langage the entropy is quite low, and dasher, only needing 3 movements (up and down, and one to start/stop editing) uses around 2 bits of input (you can desing 4 things with 2 bits: 00, 01, 10 and 11), and is therefore quite efficient. (Sorry as I am not precise here: I do not have time right now to find the precise links and numbers... I just wanted to (hopefully) clarify things for Myles325a. Hope this helps others too ^^) Edhel-Dil (talk) 11:42, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Dasher (disambiguation) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 18:45, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Now that the move is done, or half-done, there are many articles trying to link the software as Dasher, which is now a bad link, needing disambiguation to Dasher (software). See Special:WhatLinksHere/Dasher. Dicklyon (talk) 18:42, 6 January 2013 (UTC)